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The Future In BitsTue, 13 Feb 2018 20:06:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.10Altcoins: What Are They and Why Should I Care?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/v0X34B36iQ0/
http://twnow.com/altcoins-what-are-they-and-why-should-i-care/#respondTue, 13 Feb 2018 17:52:14 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=435Ah yes, cryptocurrencies; almost all of us have heard of them at this point. Between hearing your friends, coworkers, and family talk about Bitcoin, to seeing them not only discussed on the news, but CNBC even airing a tutorial on how to buy Ripple (XRP) on “Fast Money,” the topic can’t be escaped. But what about the pricing? You remember hearing about Bitcoin back when it was maybe $200 or $300, but you figured there was no way it was ever going beyond that, but now it’s trading consistently at over $10,000…you missed the boat, didn’t you?

Well, in this post we’re going to break down just how you haven’t missed the boat on the growing craze, and where you can look to next.

What Does That Mean for Me?

Okay great, so we know that an altcoin is just any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin, but what does that mean?

That means all kinds of things, but the most important of which is opportunity. Unlike the big names like Bitcoin and Ethereum, altcoins are much smaller in terms of not only coin price but market capitalization as well.

Smaller coins still haven’t seen large scale adoption yet. Unlike Bitcoin, which is all over the news and is making waves in the financial sector, the majority of these smaller coins haven’t made it to the point of the big players yet.

The majority of the smaller altcoins are still in their infancy stages, just like early Bitcoin and Ethereum.The advantage is that a lot of them, especially those with solid development teams and a strong plan, will grow to something much larger than they are now. While you may not see a coin go from $.00256 to $10,000 overnight, it is possible to see previously unheard of returns on initial investment (ROI).

If you were to take a small altcoin and invest a small amount like $200 into it early on, then the altcoin doesn’t need to hit $10,000+ for you to make money. Even if a coin were to go from only trading at $0.01 to later on trade at $0.05, that is still an impressive ROI.

By increasing in value 5 times, you would have turned that initial $200 into $1,000 on a coin that is only worth $.05! Not too shabby, eh?

That’s why you should care about altcoins. Though generally smaller in value, there is still a lot of room for growth in the market. On top of that, Bitcoin is getting older and is being seen as a less viable option for real world transactions and while it is the grandfather of cryptocurrencies, it’s not going to be the only one catching the eyes of major institutions.

“Do you mean that these will be as big as Bitcoin? It’ll go from $0.000135 to $15,000?”

Not exactly. While it is true that the cryptocurrency markets see insane fluctuations of prices and growth rapidly, the opposite is just as true. Many coins and tokens will go nowhere. Some are just a flash in the pan, the price skyrockets, drops back down, only never to see a return to the all-time-high. Keeping in mind the volatility and risks associated with different crypto assets cannot be overstated. While they have the potential for high reward, this specific asset class also has a great potential for high risk and high failure. Always do your own due diligence on a project.

There isn’t enough room in the market for the 1,000+ altcoins to make it to the Bitcoin level of value anyway. Besides there being just so many different altcoins out there, their circulation varies as well. We’ll break that down with a couple of examples.

Ripple (XRP)

Let’s take a look at one of the altcoins that gained mainstream attention recently: Ripple (XRP).

In terms of market capitalization, Ripple is ranked third, coming in just under $51,000,000,000 in total value. Wow. That’s a huge coin!

It is, but if we look at the price for one XRP, we’ll see that it’s only $1.31— why is that?

Even though XRP is a widely popular coin, there is a rather large amount in circulation (think back to your days of “supply and demand” in your first economics class).

According to CoinMarketCap.com, there are currently 38,739,142,811 XRP in circulation (with more on the way in the future). That sounds like quite a few coins, doesn’t it?

Just to put that into perspective, Bitcoin (two ranks above XRP in terms of market capitalization, at the very top) only has a circulating supply of 16,825,837 BTC, with more in the future, but only up until 21,000,000 BTC. One of the primary factors for certain coins not hitting the $10,000+ price point is how many coins are in supply.

It is important to note that market capitalization is not everything. In 2017 alone, the entire cryptocurrency market capitalization rose over 2,700% (from roughly $17 billion to over $500 billion). That’s crazy. Is that likely to happen again in 2018? Possibly, but there’s no way to know for sure. The chances of a coin with an enormous supply like XRP hitting $10,000 is pretty unlikely unless we see a massive shift in cryptocurrency adoption to the point of fiat currency being rendered obsolete (pretty unlikely anytime soon).

NEO (NEO)

Now let’s take a look at another altcoin, NEO. For this example, we check the CoinMarketCap.com page and see that it’s currently trading at around $136 per coin, significantly more than XRP, right?

In the case of NEO, there are a quite a few factors going into its valuation. Even if we aren’t thinking about the technology behind the coin and the platform built by the team, we can still see some basic differences between NEO and XRP in terms of circulating supply.

Unlike XRP’s supply of almost 40 billion coins, NEO has a circulating supply of 65 million. That’s a big difference.

Conclusion

After taking a look at both the upsides and downsides of investing in altcoins, there should be a few major takeaways before deciding to engage in the markets.

Altcoins are even more high risk/high reward than the major “blue chip” crypto choices

There are many factors to look at when personally evaluating a cryptocurrency ranging from the technology behind it, to the team, to the circulating supply, past performance, and many others

Always do your research on an asset before investing

Consider options other than what everyone is talking about

Have fun with it

Yes, you’re investing here, but with this volatile of a market, investors should never be risking more than they can afford to lose, remember to keep a sound mind when deciding how much of your assets to invest in the cryptocurrency markets.

]]>http://twnow.com/altcoins-what-are-they-and-why-should-i-care/feed/0http://twnow.com/altcoins-what-are-they-and-why-should-i-care/The future manufacturing and robotshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/YHPxeet9GOk/
http://twnow.com/the-future-of-jobs-and-robots/#respondTue, 29 Mar 2016 05:52:14 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=408America used to be quite good at mass production. I mean very good . It used to be the engine that drove the economy and ensured prosperity for a generation. But, how quickly things change. By the 1970’s, industry had started to feel the effects of Japanese manufacturing eating into the U.S. sector. From there, it was a challenge to compete with a worldwide trade environment which rewarded low skilled, low cost labor with little regulation, over a highly industrialized and well regulated skilled labor force. Then, of course, the beast of China took over, and for decades has monopolized the manufacturing of most products. With such a cheap labor force, there has been little incentive to invest in automation, but this is changing rapidly. Chinese manufacturing is no longer as competitive as it used to be, and for the first time in a long time, US manufacturing is starting to look attractive again. A few years ago when we manufactured, we only considered China as a possible option. However, this is changing because as China has driven huge amounts of wealth from its manufacturing and economic surge, its own living standards and economy has pushed the price of labor ever upwards. Once you take into account the logistical expenses, quality control and risks of doing business in China is really starting to look less attractive.

However, the Chinese are an industrious little bunch and they have not let this pass them by. The automation of manufacturing is rapidly developing in China. Therefore one must wonder how it plays out in their more restricted society, as this starts to put pressure on even low income jobs.

The first major announcement was that Foxcom was deploying a million robots to completely automate the manufacturing process83(Yee and Jim 2011). Once this was completed, it was so easy to replicate and automate the manufacturing process. In the future, Foxcom ‘s advancements will become a template for new manufacturing plants. New plants will be able to outcompete old human labor plants so effectively that the downward pressure to automate an all manufacturing processes will become a self-fulfilling process. In a certain sense, it is surprising that it is only beginning now, and I suspect that it has only been due to the fact that the cost of a human life over a working lifetime is greater than a robot’s.

The good news is that I believe that the combination of robotics and renewable energy could bring back manufacturing to the US with a vengeance. The costs of a robotic factory in the US and China are practically the same. The most consumption comes from the USA84 (Diamond 2008). There are also well-oiled manufacturing supply chains into China which will take some time to readjust. But once robotic manufacturing takes hold in the USA, how can China compete? As long as the regulatory and taxation policies of the US are progressive or even developed to encourage this type of manufacturing, then manufacturing in the USA will explode. However, the jobs won’t, and it is likely that workers, states and elected officials will perceive this as a threat to their already meager manufacturing jobs. Politicians will most likely react initially by providing a challenging environment for robotic manufacturing. This kind of shortsighted protectionism will not disrupt what could be a massive boom for the US economy for a great deal of reasons. This kind of protection legislation happens more often than you think. You only have to look at Tesla cars, which certain people mocked as a pie in the sky fantasy, only to turn around and try to ban them because they are out selling traditional dealerships85(Oremus 2013).

The robotic technology will not be there yet to build these plants without human labor, so the massive labor requirements for building this new sector will be huge. Secondly, if you can combine new robotic manufacturing with renewable energy, you effectively have zero operating cost manufacturing plants. Material costs will become the main component to manufacturing costs, as well as a small overhead to cover the financing of the equipment, and building and technology over 20-30 years.

This will have one very beneficial effect on the US economy, as it did when industrialization first took place. The cost of goods will plummet. You may think that the percentage of labor costs for a given item is relatively small. For example, an iPhone’s labor costs are around 2-5% of its manufacturing costs86(Mack 2012). But as more and more parts of the industry become mechanized, every process to achieve the end product drops. Material costs will drop by 10 %, component costs will drop 10%, assembly costs will drop 10%, and quality assurance will drop 10%. Then, if you start adding in automated logistics and robotic mining, you really begin to have a massive impact on costs throughout the process. Each process you automate you’re lowing costs, but you are also removing massive amounts of jobs. Every robotic cloud has a dark lining when it comes to jobs.

It should also increase the quality of the goods significantly. The great aspect about robotics is that there is no room for mistakes. A robot knows if it is within 0.1% of standard quality, and it will adjust or put itself into repair accordingly. Of course, with ultra-high resolution cameras and pattern recognition technology at the end of the process, even a hair out of place will be spotted in milliseconds.

While these robots will be specialists in their tasks, there is a trend towards multifunction manufacturing bots. Like human operators who use specialist machines, it is likely that robots will be flexible enough so that one type of robotic manufacturing machine can perform a multitude of manufacturing jobs.

The relationship between a business and a payment processor has hugely shifted. It is no longer a matter of evaluating a product but rather engaging a platform. It is no longer finding a vendor but rather establishing a partner.

And the best payment partner must have the visionary’s keen sense of the past, knowledge of the present, and conception of the future, all bundled up into painless, secure, profitable, and easily integrated platform.

This type of platform is Transaction Processing as a Service. TPaaS.

TPaaS is not only a platform for a business to accept payments directly from their clients (B2C, B2B) but it also empowers a business to empower their clients to accept payments (B2B2C).

A TPaaS platform is ideal for any platform that, for example, processes tickets for marathon races, collects tuition for schools, accepts donations, etc..

There is nothing cookie-cutter, off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all about it. TPaaS provides a wide array of APIs to cover every aspect of payment acceptance from the straight-forward to the multi-dimensional.

The value of TPaaS begins with simple real time merchant account boarding that presents clear and concise pricing. This is the direction the industry has shifted with micro merchants: businesses with low volume and small transaction amounts. TPaaS brings the necessary sophistication to this process for larger businesses and for SaaS platforms.

For the business who has clients who need to accept payments, TPaaS provides the ability to white-label their ability to offer real time merchant account boarding, as well as add platform or value add fees to their merchant fees, providing a business the opportunity of lifetime commissions on merchant fees.

With the ever-expanding need to accept payments in increasing new ways, allowing a business or a SaaS provider to offer payment services adds value and revenue to a process that is otherwise slippery, costly, and complex.

Imagine the following. Your business needs to provide your customer the ability to accept payments. Baked into your integration with a TPaaS platform is the ability to make that quick and simple, wholly branded with your company brand, with the option of participating in the payment revenue—those dollars that were previous an added cost for doing business.

There are a number of new players on the leading edge of payment technology, as well as veteran processors such as Vantiv and PaysTand who attempt address portions of this need. But their implementations are harder to accomplish and their solutions are less than ideal.

TPaaS is an end-to-end platform. Stop watching your potential customers slip away because of the unnecessary segmentation of older, less forward-thinking platforms. TPaaS can do it all.

]]>http://twnow.com/transaction-payments-as-a-service/feed/0http://twnow.com/transaction-payments-as-a-service/New app tries to change everything, but will it work?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/RV322cXoA0o/
http://twnow.com/new-app-tries-to-change-everything-but-will-it-work/#respondSun, 09 Aug 2015 19:58:11 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=386They say everything comes in and out of fashion, well the start of the scary next trend is here. We all remember those scary videos from the 80’s :

]]>http://twnow.com/new-app-tries-to-change-everything-but-will-it-work/feed/0http://twnow.com/new-app-tries-to-change-everything-but-will-it-work/Future Sex?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/NRQp-GNb0Nw/
http://twnow.com/future-sex/#respondWed, 25 Jun 2014 01:50:21 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=319One of my all time favourite comedies has to be Woody Allen’s Sleeper, one from his “golden era” where Allen, his usual nerdish self, wakes up into a future where America has become a totalitarian state. Allen, a crowning example of the phrase “looks aren’t everything” (remember what Roger Rabbit’s wife Jessica Rabbit said about her beau when asked ‘what do you see in that guy?’ – “he makes me laugh”) winds up getting the girl, Diane Keaton (as in real life too), but not before managing to duck out of an encounter with the Orgasmatron.

The Orgasmatron was a cubicle where couples go to … well, it’s fairly self explanatory I guess. Why bother with all the whispering sweet nothings and tender foreplay when you can hop inside a big booth and wham, bam, thank you ma’am it’s all over in less than a minute.

The Orgasmatron isn’t the only instrument of pleasure that sci-fi futures have dreamt up for us. Jane Fonda’s encounter with Durand-Durand’s Expressive Machine in Barbarella, a contraption designed to engineer death via extreme orgasmic pleasure, left Fonda in flames of passion and the machine in flames – period.

And in Demolition Man Sylvester Stallone puts on a ‘sex helmet’ offered him by Sandra Bullock but, after having a rather less than intimate, less than satisfying romantic encounter as a result, suggests they ‘do it, the old fashioned way’, to which she replies: “Eeewww, disgusting! You mean… ‘fluid transfer’?”.

What these three movie examples are all saying is that no matter how messy, how raw human relationships are, technology is no substitute.

Dr. Stuart Meloy, an anaesthesiologist and pain specialist, whilst working on a new device to treat chronic back pain, put an electrode into the spine of a female patient. The woman reported a decrease in her pain and a delightful, but very unexpected, side effect. When the treatment ended, she told him: “you’re gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!”

Meloy went on to develop an ‘orgasmatron’ device to treat sexual dysfunction in both female and male patients. But for him this technology was all about strengthening relationships; when one partner isn’t getting the same level of pleasure out of a relationship and that is then restored by technology “you’ve renewed interest in each other” Meloy said.

So is this the bright future for relationships that technology is now taking us towards?

Well, yes and no.

What is clear is that the era of the smartphone has propelled us into a rapidly expanding age of novel ‘sex technologies’.

At one end of the scale, for example, you have Pillow Talk, “an interactive product aimed at bringing long distance lovers together. Each person has a special pillow on their bed and goes to sleep wearing a wireless ring sensor. When one half of the couple goes to bed, the pillow on the other’s bed begins to glow softly. Placing their head on the glowing pillow, one can instantly hear the real-time heartbeat of their lover and feel closely connected, regardless of distance”. Sweet!

And at the other end there’s the OhMiBod! Remote, an iPhone app which, when coupled with one of a range of OhMiBod vibrators, will let you – as Techcrunch decribes it – “pleasure your partner no matter the distance”.

In fact, there’s even now an app for oral sex called LickThis. Apparently you get to lick the screen of your smartphone which – given how many people use their phones whilst on the toilet – is certainly something I wouldn’t recommend doing!

And it must be pretty obvious by now that there are more uses for Google Glass than walking down the street and seeing augmented reality information displayed across the visor. Sex with Glass is perhaps one of the more well meaning examples. And unsurprisingly it didn’t take the porn industry long to get in on the act when MiKandi produced the first “professional” pornographic video using Glass, as Mashable reported last year.

As for future uses for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset … the mind boggles?

But actually, I’m not so interested in all this sex toy tech. Sure it’s future tech of sorts. And I accept that this technology could be relationship enhancing. But in the main it’s still mostly about making ever more sophisticated sex toys. Better mousetraps, so-as-to-speak.

Yes, sex can be great. Really great! Or as Woody Allen’s character in Love and Death says, following the comment ‘sex without love is an empty experience; “yes, but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best”. But ultimately, it is (or should be, as I believe) about loving relationships.

Personally, I think that when it comes to sex & relationships we humans are usually pretty adept at getting the sex bit right and highly capable of getting the relationships bit wrong. To quote from Sleeper; Keaton: “it’s hard to believe you haven’t had sex in 200 years” Allen: “204 if you count my marriage“.

According to a BBC report at the end of last year, we seem to be having less sex, not more, and technology – social media in particular – may partly be the cause of this. “People are worried about their jobs, worried about money. They are not in the mood for sex” surmised Dr Cath Mercer, from University College London. “But we also think modern technologies are behind the trend too. People have tablets and smartphones and they are taking them into the bedroom, using Twitter and Facebook, answering emails“. Granted, there is conflicting evidence about how or whether modern digital technology is good or bad for relationships (see e.g. PandoDaily’s comments on the recent Pew Centre report).

But how much of this novel technology exists to make things better?

Well on the app side there are developments at least (leaving aside for the moment dating sites and apps such as Match.com and Tinder). There’s the Kahnoodle app. Kahnoodle Founder and CEO Zuhairah Scott Washington said that the idea for the app came from her frustration that there were apps available to achieve life goals like weight loss or managing one’s finances, but that, as a newlywed, she couldn’t find an app that would “make it easier for couples to become better partners and give each other what they need to feel loved more often… [and] proactively manage their relationship success.”

And there’s Tokii which “facilitates communication in different stages of your relationship by providing games, interactive play and relationship advice for you and your special someone”. There’s Duet which aims to “bring the romance back to one-on-one messaging” (something you probably can’t achieve by using the new messaging app Yodespite whatever Techcrunch says). Another is Avocado which bills itself as “the best way to stay connected with the most important person in your life through chat, lists, calendars, sketches, photos, and more”. And there’s Couple, “the app for two”, designed to help couples stay connected.

But I ask myself, what about the hardware?

When it comes to physical tech are sex toys the only things we can invent? It seems strange to me that relationships are intrinsically physical in so many and varied ways – including touch, caress, kiss, scent, eye contact, laughter and whisperings – yet apart from the sex act itself we seem to have come up with few “hard” technologies specifically designed to enhance that physicality? It’s as if we say we want intimacy, but all we really have on offer is sex (and we know that sex and intimacy aren’t necessarily the same thing; sex does not mean love). Come on Silicon Valley, you can do better than that!

So, if they don’t exist yet, then maybe we need to invent some?

You may have heard of Qualcomm’s X-Prize competition offering prize money to the first person to invent a real life Star Trek medical Tricorder? Well, why don’t we launch the XXX-Prize for “future sex” technologies that make a positive contribution to human relationships and wellbeing?

Well, what if you had an artificial android alter ego who’s body shell your consciousness could download into, enabling you to stay at home (or elsewhere) with your ‘significant other’ and / or family members whilst you yourself were away (on business; on military service; on the International Space Station)? You could still do all the household chores, cut the grass, get the shopping, collect the kids from school and read them bedtime stories when they go to sleep, cook a meal for your other half, and still have time (and energy) to make love to your sweet beloved at the end of the day (unlike your real self, maybe). And all the while the real you is somewhere else, maybe doing something else.

Would that be cool, or what?

Or, what the … ?!?

]]>http://twnow.com/future-sex/feed/0http://twnow.com/future-sex/Amazing wonder drug discovered that could cure anxiety and depression.http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/u7wQ1xZf5Hk/
http://twnow.com/amazing-wonder-drug-discovered-that-could-cure-anxiety-and-depression/#commentsSun, 04 May 2014 22:49:01 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=269IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: Before trying any new activity or treatment you should always consult a medical professional. While it is possible to legally acquire nitrous oxide in many jurisdictions, we recommend that you only do so through a registered medical practitioner and always check your local laws. This article does not constitute a recommendation for treatment of any disease and all information in this article is early research and needs to be substantiated through professional medical studies.

What if I told you there was a wonder drug that could cure anxiety and depression. That this drug had been used in the medical pharmaceutical field for 170 years and is considered one of the safest legal drugs in the world. You maybe thinking I’m talking about marijuana?

No. I am talking about a gas we breathe every day and most of us have experienced at the dentist, nitrous oxide or its better known name laughing gas.

But the potential of laughing gas is no laughing matter, in the US alone 40 million people suffer from the awful affliction of anxiety, I should know, I am one of them.

Almost seven years ago a military training incident left with me with a severe head injury, resulting in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Anxiety or depression are impossible to explain to somebody who has not experienced it. On a scientific level your brain gets into a cycle state where neurons in your amygdala that are responsible for the evolutionary development of fear become hyperactive, this in turn causes the brain to change the balance of neurotransmitters chemicals, especially serotonin, the receptor for the feeling of happiness. On a human level you would not wish this on your worst enemy, for me it manifested itself in an irrational fear of death, every morning for five years I would wake up in the morning and my brain would tell me I was going to die.

Now this is hard enough within itself, but trying to project to the rest of the world that everything was fine was equally challenging. Having to go into meetings and close multi million dollar deals, whilst under the table your hands are shaking is no easy feat, but life has to go on and I soldiered through as if nothing had happened.

During these five awful years of my life I tried every cure for anxiety. I mean every cure. I did the whole priory clinic psychiatric doctors at a $1000/hour to taking every type of pharmaceutical prescription drug available to alternative therapies like yoga and acupuncture. I even tried a spiritual healer to try and ‘exorcism’ the anxiety out of me, which turned out to be one of the weirdest and bizarre experiences of my life, won’t be trying that again!

Let me tell you about psychiatric pharmaceutical drugs, they do work but they are a blunt tool, and they are a pure poison to your body. Some of the side effects I endured while on them were horrific. Citalopram was the worst, when that finally kicked in after four weeks, my extremities swelled to twice their normal size and what I can only describe as cold lighting pulsated through my entire body for six hours, I genuinely think my body was close to death during that experience.

Why are these drugs a blunt tool? Because they take too long to work, when you start to slip into anxiety or depressive state you have a finite amount of time before the anxiety or depression starts to become part of your core thought process. By the time you have identified that there is something seriously wrong and had the courage (because when you’re a strong person its hard to admit to yourself that you have a problem) to seek medical help the cycle is already becoming endemic. The best thing that doctors can give you, with all our amazing medical technology is a drug that will take between 4-6 weeks to kick in, poisons your body and then only have a small chance of actually curing the problem. You maybe on these pills for the rest of your life, for the fear of returning to fearful you is not a choice.

So how did I cure myself? Well it all started with trip to the dentist during this time of anxiety. My wisdom teeth were coming out and I was given nitrous oxide as a sedative, not being afraid of the dentist but still suffering from anxiety, I started to breath in this wonder drug. Within 15 seconds my anxiety had disappeared, the freedom I experienced in that moment was overwhelming. For the first time in 5 years my brain came back to me.

Upon discovering this effect, I could not understand why I had never been prescribed this drug. I started researching it extensively, I read every research paper on it, trying to understand why we were not using this miracle drug for one of our greatest afflictions.

Having a very highly tuned brain meant that under no circumstances did I want to do any damage to it, its one of the reasons I have always shied away from recreational drugs. So I set out to learn why a legal, safe drug was not being prescribed. The answer was obvious, drug companies can’t make any money from it, so there is no incentive to run the necessary studies to show that it could help millions of people.

However what I did find out about nitrous oxide was incredible, its a completely safe (remember its given to children!), non addictive drug with a single known side effect of a vitamin B12 deficiency which can be avoided with a simple supplement.

The reason why nitrous oxide actually works is unbelievably still unknown. However I theorise that it binds to the same receptors in your brain as alcohol as well as having a secondary effect of being a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, or a fancy way of saying it binds to your happiness sensors.

After completing my research I sought out an anaesthetist who I could work with to test the effects of nitrous oxide in a safe environment, I was about to turn myself into a human guinea pig!

My journey with nitrous oxide, as with any drug, is about respect and control. Working with the anaesthetist I slowly explored doses and effects on my brain.

The truly amazing thing I found that was a single breath of Nitrous Oxide could remove my anxiety within 15 seconds. Increase the dose and you float into a higher mental plane that gives you a clarity of thought that is rare in this age of information. During this time the understanding for how my brain works at a fundamental level was awe inspiring, but that is a story for another day.

So for the last year I have been working on developing a portable nitrous oxide inhaler that mixes air with nitrous oxide at a 30%/70% mix which is optimal for reduction in anxiety but without the theoretical risks involved in reducing the oxygen levels to the brain(however from my research I cant find a single death or brain damage directly attributed to nitrous oxide) my next step is to do a clinical trial, I am reaching out to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and the Wellness Foundation to see if they will help fund such an endeavor, the mental wellbeing of millions of people could be at stake.

I welcome anybody to help me, and if you have suffered from anxiety and depression and can’t find a cure and are in the California area get in touch, maybe we can get you involved in the clinical trials.

I could be wrong, but lets hope for wellbeing of humanity I am not.

On a side note, I only had anxiety, not depression, but I think the same basic mechanisms are at play in both illnesses so I suspect it will help for both. Additionally I think Nitrous Oxide could be used to reduce alcohol dependence, I found a single study that alluded to it http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2429646/

]]>http://twnow.com/amazing-wonder-drug-discovered-that-could-cure-anxiety-and-depression/feed/3http://twnow.com/amazing-wonder-drug-discovered-that-could-cure-anxiety-and-depression/Robot Love?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/p8g87BmFYms/
http://twnow.com/robot-love/#respondMon, 17 Feb 2014 21:47:42 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=192When you’re growing up certain songs have a habit of sticking in the mind. For me, one of those songs was Connie Francis singing “Robot Man“, where Connie expressed her pining for a mechanical man, having concluded that the real flesh and blood kind were a waste of space:

“I want a robot man to hold me tight
One that I can count on every si-ingle night
He wouldn’t run around like other guys
I wouldn’t have to listen to his alibis

Three decades later Sarah Connor said as much the same thing in James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster Terminator: Judgment Day, only a little more eloquently. Observing her son, John Connor, building a rapport with the terminator robot (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent back from the future to protect him, she said to herself:

“Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator, would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die, to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice. “

Actually, the notion of robot love is becoming a serious issue. In Spike Jonze’s recent Oscar nominated (Best Picture and more) movie, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a lonely man in the final stages of a divorce who falls in love with Samantha, his newly acquired computer OS billed as the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system. “It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness,” runs the fictional advert for the Samantha OS. Siri, eat your heart out!

Meanwhile, the front cover of this month’s Sunday Observer Tech Monthly supplement shows an iRobot style android in post-coital embrace with a beautiful young woman, with the headline “Would You Make Love To A Robot?”.

Last November I ran a session during the London Science Museum’s fabulous Lates event, titled Robot Love: Sex & Relationships With Our Mechanical Playmates. We had a lot of people queuing up to get in, not least because it was one of the featured events, which shows that this is a topic of more than minor interest for many people.

Using on screen sci-fi examples which ranged from one of the earliest fembots, Maria in Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis,

through to the deliciously dangerous Number Six in the Battlestar Galactica reboot (played by the equally delicious Tricia Helfer),

and don’t fret ladies; I also featured Jude Law as Gigolo Joe in Stephen Spielberg’s AI.

I explained to my Science Museum audience that the idea of the robot as companion, lover or sexy siren has a longstanding pedigree in science fiction. And one of the themes that ran clearly through the sci-fi examples I uncovered was that robot lovers carried an element of danger and duplicity; you couldn’t trust them entirely not to try to kill you (and anyone you cared about).

The Valerie 23 episode from The Outer Limits reboot exemplified this. Here we have a female robotic companion who turns into a robot lover and then into a “hell hath no fury than a [robot] woman scorned”, a robotic version of Glen’s Close’s Alex in Fatal Attraction.

And in Eve of Destruction (a movie about an attractive female robot who just happens to have a nuclear bomb ticking away inside of her – this could lend new meaning to the phrase “she exploded in anger”) – which I also featured, we get to see what happens when one man’s penchant for oral sex gets mixed up with spitefulness and serious genital mutilation when he unwittingly tries to make out with a mechanoid.

But these examples are merely a reflection of the general unease we have about AI and robotics technologies, namely will they be driven by an impeccable logic to begin killing humans (as V.I.K.I the Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence controlling the robot population explained to the Will Smith character in the movie I, Robot)? Further examples of this are: the Skynet computer AI network in the Terminator series; Yul Brenner’s unstoppable gunslinger in Westworld; and Archos the newly created AI in Daniel H. Wilson’s novel Robopocalypse (soon – hopefully – to be a Spielberg movie).

Interestingly, Robopocalypse features a romantic relationship between an elderly Japanese man and a fembot who, because of her love for him, turns out to be the saviour of mankind (indirectly). Incidentally, the Japanese connection in Robopocalypse is not by accident; most of the developments in the area of robotic companionship are taking place in Japan, no doubt driven by the pressures that an increasingly aging population in Japan bring on that society’s ability to provide care and companionship for the elderly in future.

What is clear though is that real life robotics and sci fi robots are nowhere near in the same place. If you’re looking for a real life equivalent of Pris from Blade Runner, or Kelly Le Brock’s super sexy artificial woman created by those testerone-primed teenagers in Weird Science, then prepare to be very disappointed.

But why in any event – you may ask – would any sane person prefer Metal Mickeys (or Michelles) to flesh and blood human beings?

Well in the arena currently called “sexual preferences” we find all kinds of odd behavior. We’re familiar with stories of bestiality that circulate from time to time, some of which are true (I remember in 2004 watching a UK Channel 4 documentary called “Animal Passions”, which gave new meaning to the phrase “heavy petting”).

But it doesn’t stop with our furry friends. Just ask Robert Stewart (left), convicted of public indecency in 2007, exactly what was he was doing caught half naked with that bicycle in Ayr in South West Scotland?

(Or maybe even question the Polish contractor caught in 2008 on his knees with a Henry Hoover vacuum cleaner in a hospital staff canteen, who later claimed he was merely “cleaning his underpants”).

In this light, the notion of robot love may appear (to some) less extreme than we would otherwise imagine. Certainly Douglas Hines, the self-billed “inventor of the world’s first sex robot”, a mechanoid doll named Roxxxy, thinks so and believes there’s a market out there for this sort of thing.

Roxxy is (it is claimed) the ultimate mechanical mate, the pinnacle of achievement in robot romance. Roxxxy – we are told – is the future in human-machine relations, though one look at Roxxxy might persuade us that if this is indeed the future then it’s not particularly one to look forward to.

In which case, I think we’re pretty much safe from seeing tabloid headlines such as “Brad ditches desperate Angelina for foxy Roxxxy” anytime soon.

There are however those who truly believe that human sexual relationships with robotic creations is inevitable. One such “believer” is Dr David Levy, author of Love & Sex with Robots. Here’s what Dr Levy had to say:

“My thesis is this: robots will be hugely attractive to humans as companions because of their many talents, senses, and capabilities. They will have the capacity to fall in love with humans and to make themselves romantically attractive and sexually desirable to humans. Robots will transform human notions of love and sexuality. I am not suggesting that most people will eschew love and sex with humans in favor of relationships with robots, though some undoubtedly will … Humans will fall in love with robots, humans will marry robots, and humans will have sex with robots, all as (what will be regarded as) “normal” extensions of our feelings of love and sexual desire for other humans“.

Actually I happen to disagree with Levy in certain key areas. I don’t think sex with Robots is going to become normalised any more than sex with animals or bicycles will; and just because something becomes possible doesn’t mean that it then becomes broadly acceptable, or even right. Nonetheless, I would concede that given the human tendency to explore extremes, it’s inevitable like it or not that as robotic technology develops, sex and relationships with robotic companions will move into the weirder fringes of the spectrum of human behaviour. With the “adult entertainment” industry always keen to “push the boundaries” and experiment with new technologies and “services”, there will always be a level of supply and demand for this kind of novelty. And to this extent maybe Levy’s arguments do have some merit.

Roxxxy aside, what we do see now though in the real world is a variety of developments in robotics and AI which suggest that the concept of robot companionship is coming ever closer to reality, as we can see from this video:

And even if the notion of sex with robots becoming an everyday thing might strain credulity, we are seeing the production of robots whose responsive and / or conversational capabilities are being developed to a point where the idea of having a robot companion or helper, as in the recent movie Robot & Frank, no longer looks far-fetched. The robot seal pups in the following video show how far we’ve come:

What lies ahead then? As the development of robotics and AI proceeds with increasing pace (witness Google’s recent entry into this market arena) we may wonder where ultimately the relationship between humans and robots will lead us? As certain governments – the US in particular – press ahead with the use of armed autonomous robotic systems for military purposes (“Killer Robots” as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control calls them) to “serve and protect” us, many believe we are flirting with danger. Yes, perhaps not the cataclysmic ending for humanity we see in the Terminator movie series, but nevertheless a world where the value of human life is not weighed but simply calculated.

So what happens then when we start flirting with robots? Yes, maybe for a few of us there might be the excitement or novelty of pioneering relationships with artificial lifeforms. But we already know what happens when sex gets cheapened don’t we? Especially when a price tag can be put on sexual encounters (e.g. prostitution), which inevitably will be the case with your Roxxxy Mk III purchased for $xxx.xx from Best Buy or online at Amazon.com. Is it at all surprising that despite the efforts of the 19th Century reformers, slavery is on the increase worldwide, in many ways due to the sex trafficking trade (Soroptimist claims that each year an estimated 800,000 women and children are trafficked across international borders)? The problem, as I see it, is that sex with robots also cheapens human life; maybe not as directly as killer robots do but nonetheless perniciously, and more stealthily than any unmanned drone. It is about how we value ourselves. And inevitably, how we value ourselves will affect how we value others. If a man can make fembots respond to him merely at the flick of a remote control switch, what will he come to expect from real flesh and blood women?

And there’s another way of looking at this too. What will this say about how we value robots? No, I’m not talking here about robot rights and the like; that’s for another day. But it strikes me that if, with all the billions of dollars investment in robotics and AI, our crowning achievement lies in making out with machines, what then does that tell us about human society and what we truly value? Still, many of us carry around with us in our pockets machines more powerful than the computers that sent men to the moon in the late 1960s – yes, smartphones – and what do we mostly use them for? Games and porn I suspect. Maybe that says it all then?

]]>http://twnow.com/robot-love/feed/0http://twnow.com/robot-love/This new device that may stop the death of the PChttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/giiSWr-dUww/
http://twnow.com/this-new-device-that-may-stop-the-death-of-the-pc/#respondSat, 11 Jan 2014 21:35:02 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=184The end of the personal computer has been much talked about, however the reality is that for certain applications the PC is very much alive and kicking. The question becomes will we converge up or down?

Will mobile technology be powerful enough and their operating system flexible enough to replace the desktop, or will desktop devices get smaller and smaller until you can carry them around like a mobile.

We are already seeing this happen, a new product just launched at CES called Tiny Tango that just launched an Indiegogo campaign hopes to be the transition between the bulky PC we know and a new generation of ultra powerful ultra sleep PC.

The device is powerful enough to compete with the Xbox or Playstation but with the portability of mobile device(it is just a bit bigger than an Iphone) and its not just that the components are getting smaller, the main reason this has not been possible before is simply heat. So the inventor came up with using NASA technology to cool the unit, pretty clever stuff.

It will be interesting to see how devices like these impact the PC market.

*Disclosure, the author of this piece is an advisor to Tango

]]>http://twnow.com/this-new-device-that-may-stop-the-death-of-the-pc/feed/0http://twnow.com/this-new-device-that-may-stop-the-death-of-the-pc/Would you take a bleach bath to keep you looking younger?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/owHyStHkkjU/
http://twnow.com/would-you-take-a-bleach-bath-to-keep-you-looking-younger/#respondSun, 17 Nov 2013 21:28:37 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=176Could a bath in bleach be the ultimate way to keep skin looking younger? I used to think bleach was very dangerous, a substance to avoid at all times touching, smelling or drinking at all costs. But over the years I have learnt that actually bleach is a relatively safe substance, even in nature it degrades so rapidly that it poses very little danger.

So when I read this article on how vastly diluted bleach could actually rejuvenate the skin, I was surprised to read that the therapeutic effects of bleach has been used for decades to treat severe eczema. It seems that is very dilute concentrations(less than you find in your local pool) it has an antimicrobial properties as well as stopping certain singling in our bodies.

The body has incredible repair mechanisms built into it, and as is the case with a lot of other substances that would normally kill us at high concentrations, small doses can ramp up the immune system and make us live longer.

However I am not sure I am going to start adding bleach to my bath just yet, and I would not recommend that you do it until more studies have been done!

Would you take a bleach bath?

]]>http://twnow.com/would-you-take-a-bleach-bath-to-keep-you-looking-younger/feed/0http://twnow.com/would-you-take-a-bleach-bath-to-keep-you-looking-younger/Why you will commit suicide, you just don’t know it yet…http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Twnow/~3/IC3zjFVUmKU/
http://twnow.com/why-you-will-commit-suicide-you-just-dont-know-it-yet/#commentsWed, 06 Nov 2013 21:00:10 +0000http://twnow.com/?p=107The future of death is intrinsically linked to the future of life extension, and humanity will have to face some uncomfortable truths as we navigate the moral maze of extending our lives way beyond nature intended. We are going to have to realize the fact that within a generation or two, death will be a choice, no longer an inevitability.

Life extension will soon to become a reality, it exists today in the form of medical intervention but currently that intervention is about stopping death rather than extending life. But we are on the edge of a revolution in health extension technology and we are not talking about just extending life but reversing the entire aging process. When I tell my friends that I plan to live until 150 years or longer the first reaction is normally revulsion to the idea of being old, ill and weak for a large part of their lives. This is understandable nobody wants to be ill, weak or have an awful quality of life for 10, 20, 100 years but this misses one of the most fundamental scientific principles behind trying to extend life, that the easiest way to extend life is by reversing the aging process in its entirety.

As much as we may not like to admit it our body is just a very complicated system, we have already started to hack into its core systems through DNA, and once that code if fully understood reprogramming it becomes relatively simple activity. In fact the really interesting results on life extension come from manipulating DNA, sticking it in a retrovirus(which is basically a fancy way of reprogramming DNA) and letting it run amok in the host organism which in most cases are mice. Various studies have shown that you can increase the average lifespan of mouse by up to 60% and that’s just the start. The really interesting studies are where they aged mice to 70-80(in mice years) there hair started to fall out, their brains shrink by 25% and they develop arthritis. Once they started to apply the therapeutic treatment to these old mice, not only did they live a lot longer, they started to regrow their hair, there arthritis disappeared and there brains regrew to their original size. Not only did they live longer they became younger.

There are a huge number of moral, economical and social arguments that need to be approached once life extension becomes a reality. We will cover these in the future, but for the purposes of this article we are going to focus on is when death becomes a choice.

Death seems inherently sad for our species; it could be argued that this is just a social construct and that humans have made death sad through thousands of years of rituals and religion. Personally I suspect there is more to it than that, studies show that in the animal kingdom they also mourn the loss of individuals in a social group. So it stands to reason that both the fear of death and the mourning of death are probably woven into our evolutionary history. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective if a social species associates pain to death then that species have an incentive to reduce the risk of death for the other members. This increases the overall odds of that species will survive. Maybe death was the birth of social behavior.